Weekly Posts Digest from Numeric Citizen Microblog
7 min read
Spent most of the day working on something that I hope will have some meaningful impact. Expect the unexpected. Hoping for a change of direction for one of my favourite tools. Stay tuned. 🤫
2023-03-18
Dear @vincode, I love your Zavala outliner. It’s a great native Mac app. I found a great use case for it when putting together my YouTube video. One thing I’d like to know, you are still updating the app? Do you plan to add the numbering of outline line items? Thanks, and I hope you’ll positively answer this small request.
2023-03-19
Manuel Moreale writes on his blog:
I dislike the concept of editing old content on personal sites. And the motivation is related to my love for simple, straight to the point, chronologically organised personal blogs. I believe a personal blog can and should be a representation of who you are at different points in time. We change, we grow and our thoughts and ideas grow and change with us. And it’s important to have testament of that. If I change my mind on something and I go back end edit my post from 4 years ago, there’s no way for you to see and be aware of that change. And that’s a shame. Source: Thoughts on an unpolished note – Manu
This post made me think about the process I’m currently going through with my move from WordPress to Ghost. I’m deleting old content. In fact, as of today, I deleted about 60% of my old posts. Why? Because I feel that many posts are too time-sensitive to make sense today. They have little value to me now (and probably for the rest of the planet). I decided to keep only worthy articles that can endure the passing of time and stay relevant. My blog here, the “blog.” part of blog.numericcitizen.me better fits this purpose of expressing all sort of more or less worthy thoughts. There, I don’t care too much. And this is where I’m with Manuel. It’s all about sharing “thoughts”. Nothing more, nothing less.
2023-03-19
I recently discovered two new apps that are now in my documented toolset: Anybox and Zavala. Both apps have something in common: the ability to copy a deeplink to an object like a collection or a document. For example, in Anybox, I select a collection and use the “Copy Link” option. In Zavala, I select a document and use the “Copy Document Link” option. Then, I can use these links in Craft. Here is an example: anybox://collection/2340CA48-16BC-4F33-AFFA-6323FEB6605A. When in Craft, clicking such a link will open the app with the target object in focus and selected. It’s super useful as those apps taken together form a powerful combination.
2023-03-19
Never say never, I suppose.
It Was (Probably) a Rough Day at Craft
Craft version 2.4.5 came out today after more than six weeks since the previous release. Usually, releases come out every two to three weeks. I guess people’s expectations were pretty high after having waited so long.
Not only did the update bring very limited functionality, it broke a seemingly simple gesture that was used by a majority of users, mostly on the iPhone. As you might expect, this caused plenty of pushbacks on this. My guess is that it took the Craft team by surprise. Moreover, a new navigation sidebar design is also causing a some more pushback.
There is a recurring theme on Slack that people are tired of waiting for basic fixes while receiving questionable features they don’t see useful in general, not only for them. It’s a bit of a public relation crisis. Now my question, could this crisis be prevented? My short answer is yes. I gave a longer answer in my recent YouTube video… “A Proposal for Handling Users Feedback Differently” and published an article too.
Craft is a young company. They have plenty of things to learn, and managing expectations is certainly one of them. Managing or at the very least communicating a clear roadmap is another. It’s not enough to publish an article once a year on the company’s blog. Such messages need repetitive reminders and on more than one platform. If they would rather not share a roadmap, then they should probably stop using Slack and Circle. Those are discussion platforms where feedback and feature requests are expressed, albeit in a chaotic way.
What I’m starting to find really troubling and worrisome is the lack of fixes to obvious issues affecting many users, me included. And we are talking about long-standing issues here. Slack is full of users expressing their resentment for unfixed problems. Sure we get answers like “we’re on it”, “will check this out, thanks for the report”, “bla bla bla”. Actions speak louder than words. For the first time since I’m using Craft, I’m starting to wonder if I should reconsider my posture with my dependency on Craft.
Moving out of WordPress is such a pain. It was a pain to be there. It is a pain to get out of it. My problem: I’m moving to Ghost. I need to use their plugin, but the resulting files will get ingested in Ghost with a format that I don’t like. Each post will be inside an HTML object instead of a native Ghost post. That, I don’t like. Thinking of exporting content using WordPress export option and then translating it to Markdown. But Ghost doesn’t support Markdown files import. I could republish each post using Ulysses for example. But I cannot back-date any post when publishing.
Did anyone try importing from WordPress to Micro.blog?
Sad news. DPReview is going away. 😔
I hate Slack. I mean, a lot. What a UX clusterfuck. 🤮
There. I said it.
2023-03-22
Yesterday, I got my first ever paid subscriber to Ghost website, even though it is basically a free website. Thanks to Ghost newsletters feature, I’m offering a way for users to pay anyway as a way for showing their support toward my writing efforts.
2023-03-22 Even if my full-time job is in IT infrastructure, I hate playing with DNS and registrars.
2023-03-23
5G+
Is this new?
2023-03-23 WordPress to Ghost migration report. Content has been imported on Ghost. Domain name moved from GoDaddy to CloudFlare. WordPress subscription cancelled. Getting ready to rename my Ghost website to take over my blog domain. FYI: Ghost.org concierge service has done an incredible job in moving my content, a much better job than if I had used their WP plugin. I’m really impressed by the service. 😊
2023-03-24
Ok, I’m done with this migration/merge ops. More details tomorrow.
2023-03-25
From A to B — Another Digital Journey Completed
From the Numeric Citizen Blog
to the Numeric Citizen Space.
The former was my WordPress site, now on Ghost and merged with what used to be the Numeric Citizen Introspection, the home for my Friday Notes Series newsletter. It took me a while, but here I am. I’m so relieved from not having to use WordPress anymore. I have learned quite a bit about WordPress since 2015, but my desire to simplify my digital life was pressing me to make some changes.
From now on, in Ulysses, I got two places to push my articles, here or Ghost. That’s it.
Both are under the same domain name, which is something that I wanted for a while. Now, I hope to spend more time writing than moving things around. I will publish my migration process in the upcoming days on my Numeric Citizen I/O, my metablog.
From a design perspective, I’m using Ghost’s Casper default theme, which is relatively close to what I was using on WordPress. I’m ok with this for the moment. I may hunt for alternatives in the future, but for now, that will be it.
Now, returning to normal programming.
Found this in my archives. This was my old iPhone 7 in its old case. I love when things wear out like this.